Made in France: Societal structures and political work

By Andy Smith

How has French society been made, by whom and why? And how in turn has it influenced the French? This book sets out the institutionalized rules and norms that continue to structure France, together with the ‘political work’ that has recently changed or reproduced these power relations.

Exploring a range of age groups and types of social activity, including work, business, entertainment, political mobilizations and retirement, Made in France examines where significant change has occurred over the last four decades. Smith argues that while transformation has occurred in France's financial and education sectors, only relatively marginal shifts have occurred elsewhere in French society. To explain this pattern of continuity and isolated change, the book strongly nuances claims that neo-liberalism, globalization or a rise in populism have been its causes. References to these trends have impacted upon French politics to varying extents, Smith argues; however, France continues to be dominated by issues which are specific to the country and linked to its deep societal structures and history. Smith provides a comprehensive account of French society and politics and in doing so proposes an insightful analytical framework applicable to the comparative analysis of other nations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781526154224

Andy Smith

Andy Smith is from the United Kingdom, and has spent the last ten years in intensive research about naval operations during the Falklands War. Amongst others, he has helped multiple Argentine historians of this conflict, organised a highly successful reunion of veterans from both sides, and also put in touch individual veterans with their former enemy. After working and studying in Spain, and graduating in Business and Spanish at a university in the UK, he entered a career in marketing, and is currently living in Budapest in Hungary, teaching English. He is working on multiple projects about the Falklands War, and this is his first instalment for Helion’s @War series.

Book preview

Introduction: Societal structuring and political work

In today’s world where, from country to country, so much now seems so similar, how can one begin to account for the big differences which lurk just below the surface? As tackling the crisis sparked by the 2020 COVID-19 virus has shown so starkly, these differences distinguish but also often distance people and peoples from each other. Is the key to understanding societal variation to be found in culture, history, geography, economics, power or ideology? Using these terms separately or in combination, since the late nineteenth century social science has striven towards explanation of inter-country differences, but with rare and often fleeting success. Today, faced with the apparent homogenization of social practices across the globe, the task of explaining diversity seems to have become even tougher. This book is an attempt to tackle this challenge directly but from an angle which is rarely used for explaining societal difference: a monograph on one particular nation state. Rather than engage solely in comparative analysis with other countries, that method will instead be drawn upon in order to tease out the singularity of contemporary French society, explain it, and in so doing propose some generic claims about inter-societal difference.

More specifically, this book is centred upon what societal structures – asymmetric power relations and institutions (i.e. stabilized norms, rules and conventions) – have been made in France, by whom and why? But it is also concerned with what these parameters have made in terms of the people living in that country. In a word, ‘Made in France’ encompasses here both what structures French society and how it in turn has structured the human beings who grow up, work, play, age and die within it. Crucially, however, although deeply ingrained, these societal structures are never entirely static and impervious to change. On the contrary, they are constantly being worked upon politically, either in order to change them or to shore them up. Indeed, this is precisely why the chapters in this book take the reader ‘from the cradle to the grave’, the first aim being to show progressively how France’s societal structures fit together, sometimes with difficulty but often seamlessly. The second aim is to explain why these structures affect virtually all the ways people live and behave in this country.

Despite the apparent straightforwardness of these aims and claims, they obviously require explanation and justification, particularly as they would not be automatically accepted by many other specialists of France or of comparative analysis. Indeed, the societal structuring presented and analysed in this book stems from a structuralist and constructivist theoretical perspective that is often misunderstood by many such social scientists, and criticized by a significant number of them. Consequently, this introductory chapter defines and promotes the concepts and line of argument which make up the analytical framework upon which Made in France is based. Without wishing to hammer home its overarching message in a tearing rush at this stage, what I seek to show is that in France, as in many other countries, societal structures are made, replaced or remade by identifiable actors whose thought and actions can and should be rigorously studied. This ‘political work’, however, does not merely entail ‘ideas’, nor does it take place in a power vacuum where asymmetries of resources can simply be overcome by ‘the right views’ being voiced at ‘the right time’. On the contrary, precisely because societal structures are key components of the governing of any polity, work to gain power is part and parcel of sustained and contested efforts to impose visions of social life upon others. In so doing, the actors engaged in this work seek to affect the very structures which configure the spaces within which they operate. In short, in contrast to the 2016 bestseller – How the French Think – which romps through the history of this country by describing the writings of Paris-based philosophers and public intellectuals (Hazareesingh, 2016), this book sets out to explain how thinking and acting, throughout France and over the life cycles of its population, is structured by power relations, institutions and political work.

Before proceeding to define my key terms and arguments, however, I must first justify, and even come clean on, why France has been chosen as the subject of analysis. Answering this question is inseparable from revealing how I personally have both come to know this country and develop my viewpoint on societal difference. Having been brought up in three ex-British colonies (Nigeria, New Zealand and Fiji) then England, I arrived in France in December 1988 at the age of 25. Travelling lightly with a BA in politics from the University of Exeter, and some time after scraping through with a C in ‘A’-level French, the only thing I initially managed to do for a living was to teach English in a variety of Parisian language schools. Having stumbled upon a liking for teaching in this way, I then went back to university in Grenoble to study for an MA, then a PhD in political science. After six years in that part of France, I then somewhat miraculously got my first tenured academic job at the University of Bordeaux, where I have worked ever since. Not wishing to bore the reader with any more autobiographical detail, it is nevertheless important to declare from the outset that this book is very much the fruit of an ongoing personal and scientific journey. From the first of these angles I have obviously spent the last thirty years living in France and being affected by its societal structures and politics. During the same period, I have progressively discovered the richness of social science in general, and that of France in particular. All these experiences have obviously come to permeate my thinking, research and, consequently, the content of this book. Indeed, one of my principal reasons for writing it is to bring together, and draw deeply upon, a wealth of excellent research tools and results that are too often published only in French, thereby rendering them inaccessible to a broader readership. This material, original research of my own and a range of statistics and other quantitative data has generated the knowledge upon which the following chapters are based.¹

A second, more analytical, reason for choosing France as the subject matter of this book is quite simply that the changes and resistance to change it has experienced over the last three or four decades are particularly fascinating and, I consider, apt to generate insights into similar, yet significantly different, processes that have taken place in many other countries. In a word, although this book seeks to identify the singularity of this country and its societal structures, it does not defend the idea that France is somehow ‘exceptional’. Indeed, developed more fully in the third section of this introduction, the book tackles instead three broad sets of issues which have affected much of the world since the 1970s. Nevertheless, these have each taken on particular guises in contemporary France.

The first is the impact of neo-liberal thinking, political doctrine and policy recipes. Although in France the years 1944 to the mid-1970s were marked by the introduction of national planning and, more pervasively, the development of a strong, dirigiste (interventionist) state, since then much has changed. Indeed, in the face of what is often seen as the worldwide neo-liberal onslaught that has taken place since the 1980s, many specialists of France label the succeeding period a ‘retreat from dirigisme’ (Gualmini and Schmidt 2013: 347). However, too often research has tended to both overstate the mutations in societal structures and modalities of political work that have actually taken place and, moreover, attribute this change directly to the rise of neo-liberalism (Culpepper et al., 2006). In reality, much that was made in France during les trente glorieuses (1945–75) still remains intact, thereby providing an example of the reproduction of societal structures that also needs explaining. Studying contemporary France thus provides a means of analysing the actual societal impact of neo-liberal thought and action, i.e. how it has been translated and implemented in that country (Waquant, 2012).

A second broad theme which studying France enlightens is a process of internationalization generally labelled as ‘globalization’. Frequently linked directly to neo-liberalism, globalization is often used to encompass the effects of reductions of national barriers to, and increased volume of, international trade through tariffs and taxes, the rise of multinational ownership of large corporations and the emergence of the World Trade Organization (WTO) as global capitalism’s key regulator. Moreover, it is often lumped together with a range of disparate phenomena such as standardization within the fashion and cinema industries, or the cosmopolitan character of contemporary social and business elites. Globalization is also said to explain the rise of the tourist industry, intense use of air transport and, of course, the spreading of viruses such as COVID-19. All the above are general trends that have indeed impacted upon virtually all the countries in the world since the late 1980s. Moreover, be it in the domains of culture or economic activity, France is rightly or wrongly often seen as being one of the homes of resistance to an intensification of the overarching internationalization of socio-economic life and governance that globalization is said to encapsulate. However, the accuracy of causal claims made for globalization, and its impact upon French societal structures and politics in particular, have yet to be convincingly shown. One of the aims of this book is thus to take the measure of the effects of different strands of what has been synthesized by this term. Specifically, it seeks to reach generalizable conclusions about globalization’s causal impacts upon change or its absence in different domains of life as it is currently lived in France.

Finally, this book also seeks to tackle a third cross-cutting and more deeply sociological theme: the social mobility of its population and how it has affected institutions, power relations and governing practices. Defined initially as the ability of individuals or groups to move up or down the ‘social ladder’, and thus ‘vertically’ (Sorokin, 1927), today the term social mobility generally also encompasses ‘horizontal’ shifts, notably those that concern beliefs and values (Bréchon et al., 2019a). Over the past four decades, displacements have clearly taken place in the revenue and status of France’s population, as well as its values. First, as Thomas Piketty (2014) in particular has demonstrated, the rich in France have got much richer, whilst the revenues of large swathes of the population have stagnated in real terms. Secondly, whereas in the period 1950–80, a generalized shift towards post-materialism could clearly be discerned as in other relatively affluent countries (Inglehart, 1971, 1977), since then this trend has transpired to be less clear-cut and more complex. Indeed, for some groupings of these inhabitants, notably the most and least educated, much has changed for better or worse, whereas for others continuity has predominated (Peugny, 2013). How can one make sense of these patterns and how do they relate to societal structures? A great deal of research has, of course, been devoted, directly or indirectly, to social mobility (see Mayer and Tiberj, 2016). Amongst the claims made, the best-documented is that far from becoming ‘a middle-class society’ dominated by ‘post-materialist values’, differences in revenue, status and values have become even more patently linked to combinations of the generational cohort into which one is born and the socio-economic conditions of one’s family (Tiberj, 2017). I will return to this claim below, but it is important to also flag at this stage two, more radical, extensions of it. The first is Norris and Inglehart’s thesis that, like many other Western democracies, in recent years France has experienced the rise of ‘authoritarian populism’ (2019). The latter is manifested in particular by increased support for the extreme right Front National party (now called Le Rassemblement National: RN), ‘anti-system’ voting more generally and sustained public demonstrations (notably those of les gilets jaunes in 2018–19). However, these authors also highlight that beyond its mistrust of elites, this populism is also authoritarian because, through a process of ‘cultural backlash’ against post-materialist values and practices, it has repoliticized latent social conservatives who, socio-economically, are members of both the working and middle classes.

A second, rather different and perhaps complementary, thesis regarding social mobility is that, since the 1970s, significant parts of France’s population have experienced a new form of ‘embourgeoisement’ which, moreover, has deepened a cleavage which separates them from those who have not participated in this trend. Specifically, having documented the spreading throughout society of practices initially associated with the bourgeoisie (notably property ownership, holidaymaking and leisure activities), the claim made – notably by Gilles Laferté (2018) – is that this embourgeoisement has reshaped the contours of French society by inciting its population as a whole to prioritize not just the acquisition of property, but has also entailed a growing preoccupation for goods and services which, supposedly, ‘enrich’ (Boltanski and Esquerre, 2017) the lives of individuals and their families.

Without necessarily buying into this claim, or that of authoritarian populism, this book will repeatedly examine the contradictions which have arisen from how individuals, groups and public actors have sought to conciliate modes of embourgeoisement and populism with the rest of their respective social practices and value hierarchies. More fundamentally still, the question addressed in the chapters that follow targets less social mobility per se. Instead, its possible relationship to societal structures and their change or continuity will successively be identified and explained.

In summary, this book will engage repeatedly in general debates about the specific forms taken on by, and the impacts of, neo-liberalism, globalization and social mobility in France, but also elsewhere. Before providing a longer presentation of these three themes, explanation of the analytical framework used throughout the volume must now be provided.

Societal structures as institutions and asymmetrical power relations

As I mentioned briefly earlier, the foundations for my approach to societal singularity and comparability are built around a structuralist and constructivist political sociology of institutions and asymmetries of power. Both these terms will now be defined as pervasive and interdependent societal structures.

Institutions: stabilized rules, norms, conventions and expectations

Since the late 1980s, much of social science has reinstated institutions as key elements which structure societies (March and Olsen, 1986; Steinmo et al., 1992). Defined not as organizations (e.g. the French Ministry of Education) but instead as stabilized sets of norms, rules, conventions and expectations (Hall and Taylor, 2009), institutions shape thought and practices in many ways. Before expanding upon this definition, however, it is important to explain briefly how, in my own research, I have come to give such importance to institutions, then the way this concept will be used throughout this book.

In line with a range of leading political scientists (Abdelal et al., 2010; Mangenot and Rowell, 2010; Parsons, 2015; Hay, 2016) and sociologists (Fligstein, 2001; François, 2011), constructivism first guided my research to closely examine the role of ‘social representations’ within the structuring of societies, i.e. to produce data on representations of reality and how individuals and groups seek to ‘naturalize’ them within and between social units such as families, professions, firms, interest groups and public authorities. Crucially, however, the perceptions, preferences and positions developed during and through such a process do not take place in a social or political vacuum where the possible framings of societal challenges and antidotes are limitless. On the contrary, at individual, intra- and inter-organizational, and societal scales, these perceptions, preferences and positions are all heavily structured by institutions. Put succinctly, envisaging institutions as key social structures meshes inextricably with an epistemology which enables research to take culture seriously, but without using it as a blunt explanatory variable. Instead, by considering that institutions are both key building blocks of cultures and are themselves shaped by what is considered ‘normal’ and ‘to be expected’, the task of analysis is to enlighten the two sides of what is ultimately the same coin.

This point can be illustrated and expanded upon by highlighting how and why most societal domains have been institutionalized for decades (e.g. schooling), if not centuries (e.g. defence). Indeed, because the history of such institutionalizations has so often become invisible, it is easy to forget that the actual existence of such domains stems from each possessing their own durable set of institutions. Indeed, this will book will argue that the very categorization of a domain of socio-economic activity as a distinct societal entity only stabilizes when it becomes ordered institutionally, i.e. when it possesses a configured set of interlocking and interdependent institutions (Jullien and Smith, 2014). In the case of schooling, for instance, its rules concerning funding intermingle with others regarding the content of curricula as regards religion, or the expectations of teachers, parents, bureaucrats and politicians as regards the ‘performance’ of schools and education policies.

The second key contribution of allying constructivist epistemology to compatible institutionalist theory (Hay, 2016) is to stress that institutions not only constrain what individuals and groups are able to do, they provide the very conditions under which this activity can occur durably and with a relatively high degree of predictability. An edifying example here is property rights. In any society, the latter determine who owns what and the rights this gives them. Moreover, property as an institution enables individuals, groups and organizations to set goals for the future and move towards them on a daily basis, for example by improving and increasing the value of their housing. It follows that institutions provide durable parameters on how people within a society usually think, express their thoughts and act. Durability does not however mean permanency, since these guidelines are never fixed in stone then applied inexorably. Instead, institutions must be seen as contingent: they will survive as long as sufficiently powerful actors manage to maintain and reproduce them. Indeed, if one views society from a constructivist and institutionalist viewpoint, a basic assumption is that, as contingent societal structures, institutions always need studying as the products of sustained agency, deliberation and choice.

Unequal power relations as societal structures

Crucially, however, people within any society do not take part in public debates and social choices on an equal basis. Because of asymmetries in resources ranging from wealth and social standing to access to information, such interactions take place within highly structured power struggles. For this reason, throughout this book I will consider asymmetric power relations to be a key dimension of what structures French society and, moreover, one which is constantly linked to institutions as defined above. To do so, I will draw upon Field Theory in particular, because it is the approach best equipped to describe and unpack inequalities of power within any given societal domain. That said, for many of the components of France’s society and polity analysed in the chapters that follow, a lack of sufficient data will preclude full-blown, statistically backed field analysis. Instead, this theory of power relations will be used more generally as a ‘rudder’ for guiding analysis to focus upon powering and domination when explaining institutional change or reproduction.

So what exactly is Field Theory and what is its added value? Developed initially by Pierre Bourdieu (1992), a field denotes a social space within which actors possessing varying types and amounts of resources (‘capital’) struggle to determine, then assert their relative value. For example, this concept guided Bourdieu’s own research on the bureaucracy of the French state to discern the configuration of ‘forces and struggles’ which constitute its underlying structure of actor positions – a field of forces, which also explains why so often actors from the same field nevertheless unite in order to autonomize themselves from non-field members (e.g. senior state civil servants v. ‘outsider’ politicians: Bourdieu, 1989). The empirical description of each field is achieved first by studying the objective distribution of different ‘capitals’ which position each actor as regards others. This can be done in terms of organizations and inter-organizational interdependence. For example, in the case of European defence, Mérand and Barrette (2013) painstakingly set out the material, relational and symbolic capital of a wide range of administrations, armed forces and companies in order to discern their respective positions within the field. Moreover, as Didier Georgakakis has shown in the case of the European Commission and Parliament, field analysis can also be conducted at the level of individual actors, their respective careers and trajectories. Data on these points enabled him to distinguish between the different amounts of ‘capital’ developed by actors who have invested in the EU scale of government for many years and those who, by contrast, have engaged in it only relatively briefly (Georgakakis, 2013).

But mapping a field cannot and should not be reduced to the mere identification of quantifiable social and political capital. Instead it must also entail the reconstitution of how the actors concerned have worked cognitively and symbolically in order to protect or enhance their respective field positions. Often corresponding more or less to a profession, each field possesses a specific set of recurrent issues, ‘rules of the game’ and ‘common sense’, which also participate strongly in determining and reproducing its internal hierarchy (Mérand, 2015). For example, as our study of the European wine industry showed when tracing institutional change to struggles within the economic, bureaucratic and scientific fields (Itçaina et al., 2016), competition within each field is often ferocious. However, it remains channelled within and by institutionalized parameters such as rules on the definition of what constitutes wine, what a wine produced in certain regions (e.g. Bordeaux or Rioja) can or cannot contain, and how area-specific wine guilds are led, run and represented at local, national and EU scales.

Institutions therefore participate in the structuration, internal dynamic and external dealings of fields, just as the latter’s hierarchy and dynamics affect institutional change or reproduction. When moving towards empirical examinations of this key relationship, however, one must constantly address the question of their respective ‘reach’. For example, if many of the institutions that now structure economic competition in France have been set at the scale of the EU, the field in which it operates is simultaneously and heavily shaped by nationally established and reproduced rules, norms and conventions, but also those that exist at the global scale around the WTO. Consequently, the multi-scalar character of institutions, institutional orders and fields needs taking into account when describing, then analysing the structuring of power relations in any social domain. Indeed, as will be repeatedly highlighted throughout this book, this multi-scalarity is frequently a source of contingency, not only because of conflict over the content of institutions (e.g. trade tariffs), but because of the intra- and inter-field frictions it simultaneously generates (e.g. within and between the economic and bureaucratic fields).

Political work as agency to affect societal structures

Thus far societal structures have been defined, but their contingency – i.e. the possibility of their change – has only been alluded to. It is therefore time to be more specific on this point by underlining why, although they are generally relatively stable, both institutions and asymmetrical power relations are always susceptible to modification and sometimes even deep change. The claim made here is that all degrees of change to both types of societal structure, including significant continuity, are the result of what I call ‘political work’. Indeed, the very object of this work, and what makes it political, is to change or to reproduce institutions and power relations. Carried out, successfully or not, by a wide range of actors, political work is not however random or simply another word for ‘mobilization’ or indeed ‘politics’ itself. Rather the agency this concept enables us to systematically identify and unpack consistently takes place through and around three recurrent and overlapping processes: problem definition, policy instrumentation and legitimation (Smith, 2016, 2019).

Problematization

A first way actors in any polity seek to change or reproduce institutions and the state of power relations is by redefining the ‘problems’ which both these types of societal structuring ostensibly address. Here it is vital to immediately reject the functionalist and positivist acceptations of such problems as self-evident issues that simply arise from social malfunctioning. For example, as chapter 3 will explain in full, at least in countries like France, in the late nineteenth century ‘poverty’ did not become a social problem because all concerned recognized that for a section of the population a lack of revenue engenders poor quality of life. For a start, the protagonists who were most active in this issue area at the time had long disagreed profoundly about life quality, what constituted adequate revenue and, above all, the causal linkage between these two notions. The analytical consequence of this observation is to take on board the constructivist postulate that problems only become social when actors in key positions in the society concerned reach compromises on how what is at issue should be defined. More precisely, as Joseph Gusfield showed so clearly in a seminal book using the example of ‘drunk driving’ (1981), initially at least, several alternative framings of any problem invariably exist. For example, accidents linked to drivers under the influence of alcohol can be defined as an individualized problem caused by the driver’s lack of responsibility for their own action. But it could also be attributed to inadequate licensing laws, or even the excessive freedom given to alcohol producers to market their product ‘irresponsibly’. From the point of view of analysis, what this means is that research must always examine clearly how any problem became ‘social’ and how, in turn, this process has affected its mutation into a ‘public problem’, i.e. one meriting public intervention (Rochefort and Cobb, 1994).

Empirically, studying problematization thus entails going back in time in order to establish how the definition of ‘the problem’ concerned first stabilized, then tracing its subsequent developments. Indeed, in many instances a ‘public problem’ can itself be considered to be an institution in that it encapsulates, stabilizes and tends strongly to reproduce a specific set of not only norms, conventions and expectations, but also value hierarchies, e.g. ‘social protection’. Moreover, through institutionalizing in this way, a ‘public problem’ also heavily impacts upon the sets of actors deemed to be eligible to discuss and update its definition. French agriculture since the 1950s provides a case in point. As of that decade, ‘the problem’ of agriculture in France changed radically from being essentially one of maintaining a large peasantry on the land, to ‘modernizing’ production so as to increase national output, lower prices and foster urbanization (Jobert and Muller, 1987). But this redefinition did not simply occur spontaneously. Rather it was worked for over several years by a new coalition formed by a distinct set of farmers and state bureaucrats, both of whom had initially been marginalized within their respective fields. Indeed, not only did these actors come to power alongside the institutionalization of the ‘public problem’ they had espoused. Ever since, their hegemonic control over French agriculture has largely been maintained through a constant stream of political work centred upon problem definition.

Here is not the place for delving deeper into this example, nor for discussing refinements of the theory of public problems that have developed since the 1980s (see Gilbert and Henry, 2012). At this stage, instead it is important just to reiterate that within the political work analysed in this book, examining the transformation of ‘issues’ into public problems will provide a key means of understanding societal structures in France, their change or their stasis.

Policy instrumentation

Struggles over institutions and power relations obviously frequently also, and often simultaneously, take place over initiatives to modify or replace the policy instruments which ostensibly tackle the problems defined in each field. Such instruments are technologies of government which can take a variety of shapes. Some are ‘regulatory’ in the sense that they seek to define what is either compulsory or considered socially desirable. In the first instance, rules enshrined in law are the preferred option, such as obligations to insulate new housing to a certain standard. Meanwhile, regulating to encourage certain outcomes is often implemented through softer norms which governments or trade associations would like economic actors to adopt, such as the type of nutritional information they print upon the labels of foodstuffs. A second type of policy instrument is distributive because here the aim is to modify behaviours and induce certain social outcomes using the incentives of subsidies (e.g. to instal solar panels in car parks) or tax credits (e.g. to encourage investment in new housing). Finally, and perhaps more pervasively, policy instruments can also take the form of the very categories through which public policies are implemented, such as the eligibility criteria for receiving child benefits or being defined as ‘a farmer’. Indeed, ultimately there is no end to what precise measures a policy instrument can encompass. For this reason, constructing typologies of instruments is of limited analytical value. Instead, research in recent years has rightly concentrated instead upon two overlapping dimensions of these key aspects of public policy.

The first starts purely and simply from considering that policy instruments are never ideologically or socially neutral (Lascoumes and Le Galès, 2007). Although often presented by their implementers as concerning only ‘technical detail’, and therefore as being non-political, such instruments always bear the imprint of certain value hierarchies (e.g. the freedom to use electricity v. the societal need to save it) and causal narratives (e.g. instruments to increase demand for solar panels by artificially reducing their price) as opposed to others. Moreover, the output and outcomes of each instrument will favour certain actors and publics, whilst neglecting or omitting other potential beneficiaries (e.g. nuclear power plants v. small, localized energy producers).

This first aspect of research on policy instrumentation dovetails with a second concerning the political work engaged in by actors to propose and institutionalize each instrument. Indeed, rather than focus solely upon what certain researchers call ‘the career’ of a policy instrument (Halpern et al., 2014), it is crucial to concentrate analysis upon who mobilizes in favour of it, and the resources they possess, develop and deploy in order to do so. From this angle, for example, Penissat and Rowell (2015) convincingly showed